Thanks to everyone who came out to our roundtable, “Materiality in Contemporary Art: Compos(t)ing the Past Through the Present,” at ASAP 9 this past weekend in Oakland. We heard from poets, artists, and scholars and their varying methods and views of materiality, form, and contemporary art. I was so impressed by this conference as a whole, and can’t wait to attend again!
Check out the program here
The new issue of Ruminate is here and so is my Editors Ruminate blog. Get a sneak peek at these beautiful poems and order a copy today.
O small ones,
To be born!
—“Eclogue,” George Oppen
Small often means vulnerable. As when one person uses power to make another feel small. As when an individual seems insignificant within a sprawling system. Or when a hurricane decimates a city and we witness the extreme precarity of life. But smallness can also be a source of strength. It’s no surprise that this theme is often repeated in children’s stories: The Little Engine That Could, Jack and the Beanstalk, Thumbelina. Smallness can be the glitch in the system, the wrench in the machine. It can also be a line of poetry that reconfigures how we see the world. An image that unlocks something new. The poems in this issue explore the many implications and iterations of small, from subtle gestures of kindness to passing moments that accumulate to become something bigger than even the poem can hold.
I’m honored that my manuscript “Fossils in the Making” was a finalist for this year’s National Poetry Series, for which there were 1,500 entries! Good to know so many people are writing and submitting poetry. Read more about the winners and the contest here.
The summer issue of Ruminate is out! One of the things I love most about Ruminate is how it generates conversation. Each issue opens with notes from our readers on the theme and closes with notes from contributors. I’ve decided to join in the conversation with a regular feature called Editors Ruminate, in which I reflect on how the poems work together in relation to the theme of Opening the Door. Order yourself a copy of Issue 43 then read my take here.
My review of Timothy Morton’s latest, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, is in the March 2017 issue (44.1) of The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. You can download/view it for free on my academia.edu profile here.
I’m doing a poetry reading on Thursday, March 23 to kick off the Liberal Arts for a Fragile Planet conference at Westmont College this weekend. 7pm, Hieronymous Lounge. Paul Willis will also be reading.
The reading (and all the other plenary sessions) are free and open to the public. Full schedule here.
For those attending the conference, I’ll be presenting my paper “A New Formalism for the Anthropocene: Portable Forms for Interdisciplinary Conversations” at concurrent session 3 on Saturday. Hope to see you there!
The V21 Collective (Victorian Studies for the 21st Century) kindly published this non-Victorianist’s response to their recent special issue in Boundary2. Specifically, I respond to Jessee Oak Taylor’s piece “Anthropocene Inscriptions: Reading Global Synchrony”.
“A poetics of this material dynamism might be articulated as lower limit stone / upper limit air.That is to say, literary forms mediate ecological crisis via multiple scales and materialities—climate change is not inaccessible, as some have argued, but merely illegible when we confine our investigation to any single literary period.”
Read my full response here
Omniverse, the online magazine affiliated with Omnidawn, will be publishing our AWP 2016 panel “Poetics of Drought” in three installments. Read the first part here, featuring an introduction by me and an essay and poem by Rusty Morrison.
Get the highlights from Poetry Magazine here.
“This panel proposes that the poem is entangled with this very materiality and that the formal constraints and affordances of drought bear upon the poetic form, which in turn can reconfigure the means by which we engage the conditions of this ecological crisis.”
Update: read part two “Notes toward a Poetics of Drought” by Matthew Cooperman and part three “Beyond a Shadow of a Drought” by Brenda Hillman.
I’m pleased to have received the Henry David Thoreau fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, which means I”ll get to spend next July living and writing deliberately in Vermont! Official announcement here.
Maybe by the time I leave I will look like this
My poem, “The Waiting” is in the Spring/Summer issue of Salamander Magazine. You can preview the poem online, but be sure to buy a hard copy to read the stunning work by Dan Beachy-Quick, Patricia Clark, Michael Bazzett, and others.
